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St Mary,
Tharston

This
church is barely a mile from the main Ipswich to
Norwich road, but the lanes leading up to St Mary
are intensely rural, and snake through an
increasingly rolling landscape. The village has a
great feeling of remoteness, quite an achievement
barely eight miles from the centre of Norwich.
The lane curves widely about the graveyard, a
sign of an ancient site, and there are fine views
across the countryside in all directions. It is
an imposing building, a vital part of the
landscape.

St Mary has some fine
Decorated details, but the overwhelming
impression is of the 15th century Perpendicular
rebuilding of the nave with aisles and a
clerestory. When I first came this way in May
2006, I found the graveyard a delight - not
overgrown, but full of wild flowers peeping their
heads through the tussocks, a real haven. A jay
screamed at me from a high tree, and then fell
silent.

That day,
St Mary was one of a dozen churches which I had tried to
visit, but was kept out by locked doors and absent
keyholders. I began to think that they all must be
attending a convention somewhere. This was frustrating,
but at least Tharston listed three keys, and there was
also a notice saying that the church was open on Saturday
mornings. And so, in March 2008, we came back.

Now, the
graveyard was wilder, and the winds whipping across
Norfolk from the north-east shook the skeletal trees. But
it seemed fitting, for there is a great wealth of 19th
century headstones here, and perhaps it is the fresh
breezes on this hill top which have preserved the
inscriptions better than most. The building itself has a
couple of curiosities: on some of the buttresses on the
south side are crosses marked out in knapped flint. I
think they are consecration crosses, from when the nave
was built, and where the Bishop splashed the holy oil to
make this a sacred place. Such things survive elsewhere,
but not often. And then there' s the porch, built
awkwardly into a buttress on the north side. It seemed a
strange decision.

Tharston
is not a well-known church, and stepping inside it my
first impression was that it was rather austere, the
high, aisleless nave creating a tunnel effect. But in
fact, this is a church of great interest. Most notably,
the Victorian benches preserve older bench ends, and
three at the east end have fascinating carvings on them.
They are set in the flank of the bench end, and depict
three figures. One is a crowned Bishop holding a mitre
and book. Another is an exquisite St Michael, shown
weighing souls. Best of all, a third depicts the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, rayed in a nimbus as
angels carry her up to heaven. Little seems to have been
written about them, and a little voice in my head began
to ask if they could really be medieval. Ann Eljenhom
Nichols includes the images of St Michael and the Blessed
Virgin in her magnificent subject index Early Art of
Norfolk, but she hedges her bets a little by
suggesting that they were restored in the 1920s. In this
context, I wondered what 'restoration' actually meant.
The Assumption in particular would be a fabulously rare
survival - there aren't more than half a dozen of them
left anywhere in East Anglia, and the others are mostly
in stone.

Apart from
the bench ends, the most striking survivals here are
post-Reformation. These are the memorials, mostly to
members of the Harvey family, whose mausoleum is to the
south of the church. The two best, one in the nave and
one in the chancel, are certainly unusual. That in the
nave depicts Robert Woode as a 17th century rotting
corpse lying on a divan. A hundred and fifty years later
in the chancel, General Sir Robert Harvey has a
magnificent memorial, wholly secular, depicting two
Peninsular War soldiers flanking a litany of his
achievements. There are several other interesting
monuments, and a First World War memorial in the style of
a century earlier, of the highest quality. Presumably, it
was the Harveys who paid for it.

The
patronage of a rich, landed family is one thing, but what
I will remember about Tharston is something else again.
15th century fonts in East Anglia commonly depict lions
and angels, and there is often something rather formulaic
about them, as if they were mass produced. However, the
font here is a delight. Angels, lions and Tudor roses
alternate around the bowl, but all are slightly
different, as if carved locally by a very skilled mason.
The angel facing east is my favourite, the late medieval
style giving his eyes the appearance of him wearing
goggles, and his hair a WWII flying helmet. Beside him, a
lion looks pensively down, full of character. The lions
around the base are more familiar, proud East Anglian
symbols. Pevsner thought that the carver was also
responsible for the font at Morningthorpe. It is an
outstanding art object, worthy of a visit on its own.

The east
window is rather curious, and seems to have been rebuilt
in the early 20th century at a time when the fashion for
the Tudor style was touching buildings of all types. The
clear glass is fortunate, but there is also some good
glass in the south windows by the Norwich-based King
workshop.

On
our journey through these parishes to the east of
Wymondham, this was one of the few churches where
we found the altar dressed for Lent, a sign that
here, at least, the Anglican traditions are still
alive and well. All in all, I was really pleased
to see inside St Mary at last. It has a great
sense of being a touchstone down the long
generations, rich and poor. It is a building that
is at once a document, a keepsake and a beating
heart.